And All Our Wounds Forgiven (9 page)

“He was not allowed a space around himself that no one could enter without permission. But by now television has taken from all of us the space between ourselves and others. It deprives us of the separateness necessary for relationship. If there is no privacy, there is no safety for the soul. If there is no safety for the soul, there is only unrelieved and un-relievable terror.

“I was his privacy, the place of safety for his soul.”

On the balcony of the twenty-fifth floor, there was some hint of breeze trying to leaven the moist heat. Cal had taken off his suit coat, removed his tie and unbuttoned the top three buttons of his white shirt, revealing his brown, smooth chest. He slumped in the uncomfortable white-painted wrought iron chair, his legs raised, feet resting on the terrace railing, his head on the back of the chair, hips on the edge. His eyes were closed, as if he were napping. A hand rested lightly on her thigh.

He thought for a moment. “I would live on the side of a mountain and listen to the silence. I would live with the trees and the sky. I would read books and cook gourmet meals and I would love you.”

“And what would the silence be like?” she asked, ignoring his declaration of love, disappointed he had felt the need to make it.

“It would be the silence which is the absence of words. It would be the silence which is the absence of presences. It would be the silence that would indicate my release from duty. The silence would be God’s declaration that I no longer had to be John Calvin Marshall, that I only had to be who and what
I
wanted to be.”

God didn’t say that. Cal never told her what the FBI director had done, and only through one of the biographies did she learn that Andrea received the tape, the photographs and the list of dates and motels and room numbers, and, she learned later, so had the
New York Times, Washington Post
and other newspapers and national magazines. Nothing appeared in print.

But those were the days when the media at least still understood the distinction between private and public. Those were the days when a man could act with integrity in the public arena while his private life was a paradigm of immorality. Who could say? Maybe Jack Kennedy would have blown the world to hell in his confrontation with Khrushchev in 1962 if he hadn’t been so intent on fucking every woman he could. Elizabeth trusted a president who was fucking like pussy was going to be banned, because his interest in the continuation of his pleasure would keep his hand away from the nuclear button. If the president was really getting off in bed, then launching nuclear missiles wasn’t much of an orgasm. (It had made her wonder if the most important thing to know of a presidential candidate was if he was getting good head from someone. The fate of nations could hinge on whether the head of state was getting blown regularly and properly.)

Americans used to understand that adultery, sexual immorality and perversion had nothing to do with the quality of your work. How many of them were screwing a male lover their wives did not suspect, fondling the hairless vaginas of their daughters, or licking the clitoris of their wife’s best friends, while also doing superior work at the office or the factory?

It was sentimental to believe that bad people didn’t do good things. The private and public were mutually exclusive realms, and they required vastly different talents and skills. Few lived in both with equal facility. During the presidential primaries of 1988, when Gary Hart was caught with another woman, Lisa had written and told him not to drop out of the race but ‘Go for the adultery vote. It’s the largest untapped voting bloc in the nation. Don’t apologize, dammit! Be proud! Good sex is where you find it, and that ain’t always at home.’ She never got an answer.

Given how much adultery there was in the country, it seemed that good sex was
seldom
at home. Hart lacked the courage for adultery. Cal didn’t. Anyone who permitted himself to be used to further history’s ends deserved sympathy and gratitude, not scrutiny of every corner of his private life.

The nights she remembered most were the ones he cried. Some couples had an animal magnetism and you could smell the lust between them. Other couples had an aura of devotion, the sense of belonging together as surely as two parts of hydrogen belonged to one part oxygen to create a unique, life-giving whole. She and Cal were joined by pain. If there was a hurting inside him, she had only to touch him and he would cry.

Often he was unaware of any pain until she put her arms around him in the most ordinary of embraces. He would gasp, and feeling the shudder through his body, she would pull him closer, hold him tightly, merge her body into his. She would take off her clothes and then his so he could feel her breasts against his naked chest, could feel her pubis against his penis, her thighs alongside his, and holding him tightly, she would force the tears up and out and he would cry.

Afterward, when his sobbing subsided, often he would take one of her breasts and suckle like an infant, eyes closed, fingers resting gently at the side of the breast. Sometimes that led to lovemaking. Sometimes he fell asleep, her nipple between his lips.

How many nights he came to her broken by the demands, the needs, the factional infighting, the jealousies, the stubbornness of white southern mayors, the hatreds of white southerners, and toward the end, of blacks, too. How many nights he came wounded by the hands that reached out to touch any part of him, the old black women who came and bent their decrepit bodies to kneel and kiss his hand, the suspension of heartbeats as people received his every word as if each were a drop of plasma restoring life to a blood-depleted body. They called him ‘The Savior,” some to his face with so much hope etched in their voices you thought their hearts would break, some derisively and behind his back. Both shattered him.

Night after night she took the shards and, with her body, made the vessel whole.

APRIL 7, 1964: CLEVELAND, OHIO — REVEREND BRUCE KLUNDER, WHITE, 27, KILLED WHILE PROTESTING THE CONSTRUCTION OF A SEGREGATED SCHOOL. PROTESTORS HAD LAIN DOWN IN FRONT OF A BULLDOZER AT THE CONSTRUCTION. REVEREND KLUNDER HAD LAIN DOWN BEHIND THE BULLDOZER. ATTEMPTING TO AVOID THE PROTESTORS IN FRONT, THE BULLDOZER BACKED UP, CRUSHING REVEREND KLUNDER TO DEATH.

JUNE 21, 1964: PHILADELPHIA, MISSISSIPPI — JAMES CHANEY, 21, ANDREW GOODMAN, 21, AND MICHAEL SCHWERNER, 25, MURDERED.

JULY 11, 1964: COLBERT, GEORGIA — LT. COL. LEMUEL PENN, 49, MURDERED WHILE RETURNING FROM TWO WEEKS OF ARMY RESERVE TRAINING BY KLANSMEN WHO WANTED “TO KILL A NIGGER.”

JULY 12, 1964: MEADVILLE, MISSISSIPPI — A MAN FISHING IN THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER FINDS LOWER HALF OF BADLY DECOMPOSED BODY. THE FOLLOWING DAY A SECOND BODY IS FOUND, DECAPITATED, A PIECE OF WIRE WRAPPED AROUND ITS TORSO. CHARLES EDDIE MOORE, 20, AND HENRY DEE, 19, HAD BEEN MURDERED BY KLANSMEN WHO BELIEVED THE TWO WERE BLACK MUSLIMS PLANNING AN ARMED UPRISING. ALTHOUGH THE TWO MURDERERS CONFESSED, ALL CHARGES WERE DISMISSED WITHOUT EXPLANATION.

FEBRUARY 26, 1965: MARION, ALABAMA — JIMMIE LEE JACKSON, 27, KILLED BY A STATE TROOPER DURING A CIVIL RIGHTS MARCH.

MARCH 11, 1965: SELMA, ALABAMA — REVEREND JAMES REEB, A WHITE, UNITARIAN MINISTER FROM BOSTON, BEATEN ON THE STREETS OF SELMA AND DIES TWO DAYS LATER. IN CONTRAST TO THE MURDER OF JIMMIE LEE JACKSON, REEB’S DEATH PROVOKES NATIONAL OUTRAGE. PRESIDENT JOHNSON PHONES REEB’S WIDOW AND VICE-PRESIDENT HUMPHREY ATTENDS HIS FUNERAL. JIMMIE LEE JACKSON’S MOTHER RECEIVED NO PHONE CALL FROM THE PRESIDENT AND NO PRESIDENTIAL REPRESENTATIVE ATTENDED HIS FUNERAL. FOUR DAYS AFTER REEB’S DEATH, PRESIDENT JOHNSON SENDS A VOTING RIGHTS BILL TO CONGRESS AND ADDRESSES THE NATION ON TELEVISION, CONCLUDING WITH THE WORDS, “WE SHALL OVERCOME.’’

MARCH 25, 1965: LOWNDES COUNTY, ALABAMA — VIOLA LIUZZQ, 40, A WHITE MOTHER OF FIVE FROM DETROIT, SHOT AND KILLED WHILE DRIVING A CIVIL RIGHTS MARCHER BACK TO SELMA AFTER THE SELMA-MQNTGQMERY MARCH.

JUNE 2, 1965: VARNADQ, LOUISIANA — ONEAL MOORE, 34, FIRST BLACK DEPUTY IN WASHINGTON PARISH, SHOT AND KILLED.

JULY 18, 1965: ANNISTQN, ALABAMA — WILLIE BREWSTER, 39, SHOT AND KILLED WHILE DRIVING HOME FROM THE PIPE FOUNDRY WHERE HE WORKED.

AUGUST 20, 1965: HAYNEVILLE, ALABAMA — JONATHAN DANIELS, 26, A WHITE MINISTERIAL STUDENT, SHOT AND KILLED.

JANUARY 3, 1966: TUSKEGEE, ALABAMA — SAMUEL YQUNGE, JR., 22, A STUDENT CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVIST, SHOT AND KILLED TRYING TO USE WHITES ONLY RESTRQQM AT A SERVICE STATION.

JANUARY 10, 1966: HATTIESBURG, MISSISSIPPI — VERNON DAHMER, 58, VOTING RIGHTS ACTIVIST, KILLED WHEN HIS HOME IS BOMBED.

JUNE 10, 1966: NATCHEZ, MISSISSIPPI — BEN CHESTER WHITE, 67, MURDERED BY THREE WHITE MEN WHO WANTED TO KILL A NIGGER.

FEBRUARY 27, 1967: NATCHEZ, MISSISSIPPI — WHARLEST JACKSON, 37, MURDERED AFTER BEING PROMOTED TO A PREVIOUSLY WHITE-ONLY JOB AT THE ARMSTRONG RUBBER COMPANY WHERE HE WORKED.

MAY 12, 1967: JACKSON, MISSISSIPPI — BENJAMIN BROWN, 22, WHILE GOING TO A RESTAURANT TO GET A SANDWICH FOR HIS WIFE, KILLED WHEN POLICE FIRE ON PROTESTORS THROWING ROCKS AND BOTTLES FARTHER DOWN THE THE SAME STREET.

FEBRUARY 8, 1968: ORANGEBURG, SOUTH CAROLINA — SAMUEL HAMMOND, 19, DELANO MIDDLETON, 18, HENRY SMITH, 20, SHOT AND KILLED WHEN HIGHWAY PATROLMEN FIRE ON STUDENT PROTESTORS.

i have wondered if the real work of the civil rights movement was not interracial sex. do not misunderstand. i am not deriding the passage of the 1964 civil rights act or the 1965 voting rights act. i am not dishonoring the memories of all of us who died. but if social change is the transformation of values, then the civil rights movement did not fulfill itself. there has not been any diminution in the ethic of white supremacy’, instead racism has added legions of
black
adherents, making america an integrated society in a way i never dreamed. our racial suspicions and hatreds have made us one nation.

the sixties were unique because so many blacks and so many whites took the risk of extending themselves toward the other. in the twentieth century, there was a brief period of a mere eight years when a significant number of blacks and whites lived and worked and slept with each other. those who did so were forever changed.

i used to feel guilty about what seemed a compulsion to be with a white woman. i do not know even now when the feeling began. i suspect it antedates my existence, that it begins — where? — on the slave auction block at annap-olis? or charleston? or savannah? who was that african who survived the middle passage, survived the breaking-in period in the west indies where he was acculturated to slavery and then, brought to these shores and placed on an auction block? while standing there did he look out and see for the first time a woman with skin the color of death and hair the color of pain and eyes the color of the corpse-filled sea? did he look at her and she look at him and know?

i was around 7. one Saturday morning i went into montgo-mery with my father. we were walking along a street. i happened to look up and see a white girl on the other side. she looked like a woman. given my age, she was probably no more than 12. into my mind came the words: “I’m going to marry her one day.” she did not see me, did not know i existed on the planet. what did i
see
that led to such words? it was as if the story had been leading to that moment for centuries: “i’m going to marry her one day.”

that is how social change happens. a 7-year-old alabama colored boy thinks a thought it is doubtful any other 7-year-old alabama colored boy had ever thought. except, and i need to be accurate, i didn’t think it. the thought thought me. however, i did not reject it. other 7-year-old alabama colored boys had been thought by similar thoughts — ‘i wish i could marry her.” “i sure would like to marry her.” they yearned. i asserted: “i’m going to marry her one day.”

what did it mean? what was i trying to tell myself? the first time elizabeth and i were together. we were both nervous. more, we were frightened. she was a virgin, but the anxiety was other. what we were about to do had been forbidden for centuries. black man. white woman. it was a social taboo with almost as much force as the one against incest. black men were killed if a white man thought they might be thinking about white women. Emmett Till. Mack Charles Parker.

could she and i act as individuals? were we strong enough to defy four centuries of history?

in the sixties a lot of black men and white women tried to heal history with their bodies. i am not naive. i know many of those black men and white women abused each other. i know many black women were made to feel worthless as they saw black men walk past them to get to the nearest white woman. history extracts its price, regardless. i also know that some of history’s wounds could not have been tended any other way.

i loved her from the moment i saw her picture on the front page of the newspaper. who was this young white girl that dared cross over, this young woman whose beauty was apparent even in the grainy texture of a newspaper photo, this young woman whose wealth and background exempted her from the cares and concerns of ninety-nine percent of those on the planet? was she guilt-ridden because she was white and wealthy? that evening on huntley-brinkley they showed film of the arrests in nashville and there she was, walking easily, almost leisurely, from the store where they had been sitting-in and into the paddy wagon.